ABSTRACT

When Edmund Calamy (1671-1732), the great London Presbyterian preacher and chronicler of the ministers who were ejected from their livings by the Act of Uniformity in 1662, considered the career of Timothy Wood (1617-80), vicar of Sandal Magna in Yorkshire, he concluded that cHe was a Man of prodigious Parts, and Industry; and good Elocution. He had fram'd a Common Place Book of all the Heads of Divinity, containing the Quintessence of the choicest Authors he had Convers'd with: But he Printed nothing.'1 Calamy successfully adapted the biographical techniques of Reformation martyrologists in order to provide a record of the sufferings of a modern generation of witnesses to the Protestant conscience. The exemplary lives that he wrote stood as a reproach to the intolerance of bishops and churchmen and as models for the personal behaviour of godly nonconformists.2 Readers of Calamy approached his work in this spirit. John Collett Ryland (1723-92), a Baptist minister and schoolmaster at Warwick and from 1759 at Northampton, marked the margins of his copy of Calamy with instructions and admonitions to his son, John (1753-1825), who assisted his father as preacher and pastor from 1770. Beside the account of Timothy Wood's careful compilation of a personal handbook of theological quotations, the elder Ryland wrote: T)o the same my son John Ryland.' Elsewhere, he drew attention to the habits of fine preachers and of ministers who took care over catechizing poor children or provided them with good books to read.